I was at a yipster bar in the land of comfy dreams last night, drinking breakfast ale and communing via the Obama phone with one of my devilish kind when he spake the following:

“Here’s an article you need to write. After fifty we aren’t supposed to learn anything—let alone broke, injured and sick. I remember going to the book store with you when you were in so much pain you couldn’t stand and were out there squatting against the wall in agony. Then I put you on the train and you’re coughing up blood and I’m like, ‘Oh, shit. This could be it. He might be done.’ Then, in the time since you’ve come up with like three knew angles on things that none of these big-brained people out here not only can’t come up with, but can’t wrap their head around. I’ve been reading you since 2000, since the Paladin days and there seems to have been this big opening of your perspective starting in 2014, right before the Purge in Baltimore, almost like you grew this extra eye just in time to see what was really going down when everyone else was seeing what they were supposed to see. It’s like, right when you were supposed to be checking out you started seeing stuff. Could you identify those moments of clarity?”

Thank you, Mister Grey for this dark idea.

People starting calling me a devil when I was 18, when I was as stupid as most teens are. This continued through every decade of my life, usually with coworkers or girlfriends assigning me the mark of the beast when I failed to submit to their low expectations of me. It wasn’t until I was assigned this designation by ebon warriors in Baltimore, who began calling me “the devil” “the snake,” “that man,” “the Man,” and even “the white devil,” that I decided to own it, to embrace my heretical view of our sacred garden of dreams by smiling and agreeing and striving to live up to my evil name, and by expressing these views in fiction in 2009.

I had previously uncovered many martial arts lies in my Paladin books and was hoping to take a positive look at the Truth, rather than always mining its opposite. Actually writing fiction, I think, was the key to activating my brain along lines beyond mere skeptical investigation.

2009: The Sunset Saga, which began as the book Of the Sunset World, which became two large novels and spawned 8 sequels, was the event that fundamentally changed the way I viewed the world. This was a private endeavor and I was doing it largely to avoid sharing my thoughts with people, knowing full well that almost no one was going to read this stuff.

The rest of my evil wokedness, my largely unsought Luciferian illumination of the dark truths so shabbily concealed behind our bright shining lies, where far more mundane and seem to be mostly information dumps that prompted the science-fiction novelist within to take notice.

2010 or 2011: In November, I think, a Baltimore County cop, in an area where I was being hunted by hoodrats while headed to work my night job, bypassed many ebon Americans to harass the shit out of me and tell me I didn’t work where I worked. At almost 50 years old, I thought it was quite ominous that I had suddenly become the criminal food on the PIG menu. This is expressed in one of my first Harm City articles, Officer Manfriendly

2012: I realized that my first year living without a TV had seriously altered my perspective to a point of extreme deviation from the norm. I lost friends and was even disinvited to Thanksgiving dinner by my mother so that my ex-wife would not be offended by my toxic presence.

2014: Increased ebony hostility began to reach game preserve levels, with me being the rare ibex in the crosshairs, in total contrast to all media consumed by my family members, who actually thought I was losing my mind and hallucinating about attacks on my person and police harassment. I was simply the only resident of Baltimore City and only pedestrian in the family. My perspective gained here was born of being a three-time economic loser.

2014: I reread They Were White and They Were Slaves by Hoffman for use as a search cue for researching white slavery for The Sunset Saga novel Seven Moons Deep. This caused an avalanche of awakening as lie upon sacred lie would fall before my bemused eyes through 2016 until I realize that some higher power had decided that I needed to be a historian and that I was not yet poor enough to get the message.

2015: The Baltimore Purge, which I lived through, while the rest of the world was calling it a riot, woke me all the way up—and from there my reality began to diverge over the course of the intervening years from the Holy Lie lived under and loved by almost all of my fellow Americans, as the ongoing reality of The Purge, became almost immediately the lie of Riots, then the holy writs of “the unrest,” “the uprising,” and finally “The Rising.” Once that work-a-day hunt for my pale, broke-ass across the moonscape of Baltimore took on the trapping of a crusade in the American consciousness, I knew in the depths of my dying soul that I was forever cursed to be an outsider looking in on humanity.

2017: I was, as an injured, sick and increasingly fat, white-bearded paleface, attacked 20 times that year, just trying to get back and forth to work my $10 an hour job. Finally, on a weekday night in early December, I was attacked by two pairs of men on my way to work, the second pair coming after me because I interrupted their abduction of a woman and then they let me go, looking at me in my 30-year-old threadbare jacket and decided I wasn’t worth rolling over. This broke me mentally, in the starkest terms, destroying my ideal of myself as a man—now reduced to tasteless prey tossed back into the gutter from whence it was dredged. I quit my job that night and then embraced the life of a failing writer and have become a very fortunate kind of hobo.

2018: Losing the ability, In June, of paying rent for a room in the Baltimore area, I became homeless and have gotten to see more of the country in these 2 years than in all of my previous 55 years. This has made me more strange of mind.

Brother, God—who wears boots and not sandals—has just kicked me in the head in such a combination and has driven my simian skull against the curb of the American Lie to the point where I have a very good vantage of the sewer of Modernity that runs beneath that Lie. And as he stomps my face into the sewer grate, I am even being treated to a rare view of the substrata of our Dreaming City, the greatest Lie of them all, Civilization.

I went out last night and got so drunk I don’t remember how I stumbled back to the yurt across this sissy city, all in a bid to render my brain useless for such articles as this, in hopes of finishing those three novels clinging like monkeys to my silvery back.

Apparently last night was a failure and a waste of $38 devalued dollars.